Consuming Java Webservice TimeStamp from .net and WCF

Question

We are trying to talk to a (possible)Java WebService from .NET 3.5 using WCF. The WebService defines a Timestamp object which seems to be a datetime without the decimal milliseconds.

WCF decided .NET would use a datatime as the object backing in the proxy class. When sending objects with the timestamp to the Java WebServer the datetime is serialized and includes the miliseconds. This results in a Fault.

How do we a) Cause .NET to select a custom class we implement (So we can format the message) or b) Cause WCF to generate the datetime based on the XSD files included with the WSDL?

Issue Definition: Timestamp needs to look like: 2010-01-01T01:01:01-07:00

Yet .NET generates a timestamp with decimal seconds like: 2010-01-01T01:01:01.1234-07:00

Answer 1

Can you modify the code to pass it as a string and format it in the .ToString() method as shown in the following snippet?

SomeTime.ToString("yyyy-MM-ddThh:mm:ss")

Answer 2

By "WCF decided .NET would use a datetime", I get the feeling you used visual studio to add a reference to the web service.

Instead I'd recommend using SvcUtil to generate a proxy, then add that to your project. This way you can edit the proxy directly and make it behave how you need (for example, serializing a string rather than a datetime, or formatting it differently).

Any time the service contract changes, you need to create a new proxy and merge your changes in, but this is normally a small price to pay for the additional control.

Answer 3

I figured out a few ways to handle this problem. The more complicated methods involve hooking of a custom MessageFormatter Endpoint.

We found a simple way to to this.

the Fraction of seconds are only generated if the datetime object has them.

What we did:

We created a static on propertychange event handler that uses reflection to detect datetime datatypes. When found we recreate the datetime without the fractions of seconds. In our case we didn't care about seconds at all. We wire the event up in a partial class constructor. Thats it.

Of course

public static class DateTimeSecondCatcher
{
    PropertyInfo dateTimePropertyInfo = sender.GetType().GetProperty(e.PropertyName);
        if ((dateTimePropertyInfo != null) && (dateTimePropertyInfo.PropertyType == typeof(DateTime)))
        {

            DateTime dteValue = (DateTime)dateTimePropertyInfo.GetValue(sender, null);
            if (dteValue.Millisecond > 0)
            {
                dateTimePropertyInfo.SetValue(sender, new DateTime(dteValue.Year,dteValue.Month,dteValue.Day, dteValue.Hour,dteValue.Minute,dteValue.Second,0,dteValue.Kind), null);
            }
        }

}


// This code goes in the partial class constructor
this.PropertyChanged += new PropertyChangedEventHandler(DateTimeSecondCatcher.OnPropertyChanged);